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Updated January 16, 2005 0:33 AM
Legislative caps on tuition may be revisited
Editor’s note: This is the first in a two-part series examining higher education issues facing the Texas Legislature.
By BRETT NAUMAN
Eagle Staff Writer
Although public school finance reform is expected to dominate this legislative session, some lawmakers expect a serious debate in higher education about rising tuition costs at public universities.
Lawmakers deregulated tuition during the 2003 session, removing legislative caps and giving public universities the power to set their own rates. The result has been dramatic tuition hikes at Texas A&M and other state-supported universities, state Rep. Fred Brown said.
University officials will have to explain those increases to lawmakers during the session and account for how they now are using the additional money, said Brown, R-College Station.
Modifying the state’s top 10 percent automatic admission law and discussion about the number of years it takes for students to graduate also are major issues to be addressed, according to the House Research Organization.
The bipartisan group of House staffers has polled lawmakers, agency directors and special interest groups during recent months and published a report on the topics likely to be addressed during the session.
Texas A&M University has increased one of its two forms of tuition by $32 to $74.50 per semester credit hour — a 75 percent hike — in the two years since tuition was deregulated.
But A&M has shown “restraint” compared to the state’s other flagship university, said Stanton Calvert, the A&M System’s vice chancellor for governmental relations. The University of Texas has increased tuition by $46 to $94 per semester credit hour over the past two years, a 96 percent hike, Calvert said.
A&M President Robert Gates said the tuition increases at A&M were needed to make up for state cuts of $3 million made during the last session and to fund other rising expenses, such as employee salaries and health-care costs.
Gates said a tuition increase may be needed again this year. The amount will be tied directly to how much state funding A&M receives during the current session, Calvert said.
“That’s going to be our message to legislators,” Calvert said. “We’re going to depend on you to provide funding to A&M, and then we’re going to make up the difference by raising tuition.”
While Brown and state Sen. Steve Ogden, R-Bryan, said the tuition hikes at public universities concern them, they do not believe deregulation will be overturned during the session.
But one member of the House says he wants to do just that. Rep. Garnet Coleman, D-Houston, said he will file a bill to end tuition deregulation during the session.
Tuition rates need to be set by the Legislature, Coleman said. Otherwise, boards of regents will approve increase after increase with no one to hold them accountable, he contended.
The Legislature has, in essence, condoned the hikes at universities across the state by not providing adequate funding for higher education during the last session, Coleman said.
“It’s a slick deal,” he said of tuition deregulation. “It’s a tax shift to the students. If you take $350 million away from higher education, it has to be made up somewhere, and it’s being made up with tuition.”
Ogden, who is chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, said he did not anticipate such high tuition increases when he voted to give universities the authority to raise rates during the 2003 session.
Lawmakers have reached a “philosophical crossroads” when it comes to funding higher education and now must determine who should be responsible for paying for increases, Ogden said.
“The issue from a philosophical standpoint is that the primary beneficiary of a college education is the person who receives it,” he said. “So what’s the taxpayers’ obligation to make sure the person who’s benefiting gets an education for next to nothing or free? What we’re evolving to is a system where the universities set the market rate.”
Getting universities to encourage students to graduate within four years will be the major issue Brown said he wants to examine and question campus officials about during the session.
The Legislature provides universities with about $7,800 in state funding per student each year, Brown said. Students who take five or six years to graduate are driving up education costs, he said.
“If we have 50,000 students we could graduate a year earlier, it’s $300 million in one year’s time we could save,” Brown said. “Now we’re talking about real money.”
A&M has the highest four-year graduation rate among the state’s largest universities, Brown said. But every university needs to work on getting students through the system quicker, he said.
About 35 percent of A&M students graduate within four years, Gates said. About 69 percent graduate within five years and 75 percent earn a degree within six years.
Compared to some larger universities in the nation, Texas universities lag in their four-year graduation rates, Gates said, agreeing with Brown that there is a problem to be addressed.
“That’s one thing we’re going to be working on,” Gates said. “We move our students to a degree slower. The bottom line is Fred has put his finger on an important issue.”
Gate said the way he looks at the issue is that a student who graduates in five years instead of four misses out on roughly $65,000 when adding costs of school and the average $37,000 a graduate would have made if employed during the fifth year.
Brown said universities need to offer such incentives as tuition and loan rebates for students who graduate on time. And A&M, specifically, needs to start offering more classes over the Internet, Brown said.
Students also should be encouraged to take classes during the summer, he said. He plans on filing a bill to establish a program at A&M in 2006 that would slash summer tuition costs in half.
“Our facilities don’t go away, and our professors don’t go away during the summer,” Brown said. “It costs the same to air condition a building whether there’s students in it or not.”
Lawmakers also will discuss changing the law that allows those in the top 10 percent of their high school class to be admitted automatically into the college of their choice, according to a House Research Organization report.
A possible change would be to give students automatic admission to a university system rather than a university, giving compe ive universities like A&M and UT more freedom in choosing their classes.
The report also said restoring cuts to financial aid and grant programs will be discussed during the session.
